Freedomnomics: Why the Free Market Works and Other Half-Baked Theories Don't by John Jr. (books that read to you TXT) 📕

government, aside from periods of wartime, consumed about 2 to 3 percent of GDP up until World War I. That was the first American war after which government spending did not return to pre-war levels. Then, in the 1920s, non-military federal spending began steadily climbing. President Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s—often viewed as the genesis of big government—really just continued an earlier trend. What changed before Roosevelt came to power that explains the growth of government? The answer is women’s suffrage.

For decades, polls have shown that women as a group vote differently than men do. In presidential elections from 1980 to 2004, the “gender gap”—the difference between the way men and women vote—was in the double digits in six of the seven contests, reaching its peak of 22 percentage points in 2000.2 This disparity—in which a higher percentage of women consistently vote Democratic—is very important politically. Excluding the women’s vote, Republicans would have swept every presidential race but one between 1968 and 2004.3

Gender gaps exist on various issues. Perhaps the most significant one is the push for smaller government and lower taxes, which is a much higher priority for men than it is for women. This is seen in divergent attitudes held by men and women on many separate issues. Women were much more opposed to the 1996 federal welfare reforms, which mandated time limits for receiving welfare and imposed some work requirements on welfare recipients. Women are also more supportive of Medicare, Social Security, and education expenditures.4

Studies show that women are generally more risk averse than are men. Consequently, they are more supportive of government programs to insure against certain risks in life. Women’s average incomes are also slightly lower and less likely to vary over time, which gives single women an incentive to prefer more progressive income taxes. Married women, however, bear a greater share of taxes through their husband’s relatively higher income. Not surprisingly, married women are less supportive of higher taxes than are other women.5

But marriage also provides an economic basis for men and women to prefer different policies. Because women generally shoulder most of the child rearing responsibilities, married men are more likely to acquire marketable skills that help them earn money outside the household. If a man gets divorced, he still retains these skills. But if a woman gets divorced, she is unable to recoup her investment in running the household. Hence, single women who believe they will eventually get married, as well as married women who most fear divorce, look to the government for a form of protection against the risk of divorce—that is, a more progressive tax system and other government transfers of wealth from the rich to the poor. The more certain a woman is that she doesn’t risk divorce, the more likely she is to oppose such transfers. This makes perfect sense—although every society has its altruists, most people don’t want to share their household income with the government if they don’t expect to benefit much from it.

So we see that certain kinds of women tend to support bigger government. Has it always been this way? Can women’s suffrage in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century thus help to explain the growth of government?

A good way to analyze the direct effect of women’s suffrage on the growth of government is to study how each of the forty-eight state governments expanded after women obtained the right to vote. Women’s suffrage was first granted in western states with relatively few women—Wyoming (1869), Utah (1870), Colorado (1893), and Idaho (1896).6 It was then extended to eight states between 1910 and 1914, and another seventeen states between 1917 and 1919. Thus, women could vote in twenty-nine states before women’s suffrage was achieved nationwide in 1920 with the adoption of the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution.

If women’s suffrage increased government, our analysis should show a few definite indicators. First, women’s suffrage would have had a bigger impact on government spending and taxes in states with a greater percentage of women. And secondly, the size of government in western states should have steadily expanded as women comprised an increasing share of each state’s voting populations.

Women’s suffrage dramatically increased total voting turnout, as demonstrated in Figure 1. Voting participation as a percentage of the adult population7 immediately rose from 25 to 37 percent after achieving suffrage, with a slower, continuing rise to 43 percent over the subsequent decade.8 Figure 2 graphs the relationship between the granting of women’s suffrage and per capita state government expenditures and revenue.9 This chart shows that state governments grew significantly immediately after women were enfranchised.10 State government spending had fallen for four of the five years before women began voting, reaching its lowest point just before the granting of suffrage. But within four years after women’s suffrage, state government expenditures had risen above the previous peak. Within eleven years, real per capita spending had more than doubled—an amazing increase in the size of state governments.11

Yet, as suggestive as these graphs are, we must still consider whether women’s suffrage itself caused the growth in government, or did the government expand due to some political or social change that accompanied women’s suffrage?

Fortunately, there was a unique aspect of women’s suffrage that allows us to answer this question: of the nineteen states that had not passed women’s suffrage before the approval of the Nineteenth Amendment, nine approved the amendment, while the other ten states had suffrage imposed on them. If some unknown factor caused both a desire for larger government and women’s suffrage, then government should have only grown in states that voluntarily adopted suffrage. This, however, is not the case—after approving women’s suffrage, a similar growth in government was seen in both groups of states.12

Figure 1: The Effect of Giving Women the Right to Vote on The Percentage of the Adult Population that Votes

Figure 2: The Effect of Giving Women the Right to Vote on Per Capita State Government Expenditures and Revenue

Women’s suffrage